Last Tuxedo Standing

It’s easy to sneer at Jerry Lewis, and pooh-pooh his acclaim in France. But as the surviving clown prince of the vaudeville-to-Vegas era hosts his final muscular-dystrophy telethon for “Jerry’s Kids,” this Labor Day, the author wonders if the French don’t have a point.

Remember the old joke about bandleader Guy Lombardo—“When Guy Lombardo dies, he’s taking New Year’s Eve with him”? Oh sure you don’t. Every December 31, Guy and his Royal Canadians would ring out the old / ring in the new to the shipboard sway of “Auld Lang Syne” in a national broadcast that made the conductor synonymous with balloons dropping at midnight and wheezing kazoos. Then death stilled Guy’s baton, deputizing Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest to carry on the holiday tradition, and so America’s decline began. Could this be the year when Jerry Lewis takes Labor Day as we know it with him? Not because Jerry’s due to join Lombardo in that big ballroom in the sky, though at the age of 85 he has to be careful how hard he blows out the birthday candles, but because this will be the last Labor Day weekend that he will be hosting the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, raising millions for “Jerry’s Kids.” When Lewis sings “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at this year’s close, as he has tearfully, raggedly, undauntedly done for the last 45 years, it will be the end of a showbiz era, a proud reign of pomade. A performer since the age of five, Lewis himself embodies the end of an era stretching from vaudeville to Las Vegas—the last surviving clown prince of nightclub comedy and movie slapstick mime. His former partner Dean Martin, that golden raisin whose crooning voice poured like a pitcher of caramel goo, died in 1995 and was the subject of a crackling bromantic memoir by Lewis (co-written with James Kaplan), called Dean and Me: A Love Story. (A one-sided love story, Dean’s cool indifference being as tough as Naugahyde. The emotional bullet of the book comes when Lewis tells Dean about the love that glued their teamwork, and Martin fires back point-blank: “You can talk about love all you want. To me, you’re nothing but a fucking dollar sign.”) Jerry’s sidekick announcer for the telethon, Ed McMahon, whose copper pipes and heigh-o ebullience seemed immortal, passed away in 2009. The telethon will be less of a marathon this Labor Day, shortened to 6 hours from the 21-hour gruelers of the past. Its former duration imbued it with psychodrama and suspense as Jerry, racked by fatigue and frustration, would start laying a super-heavy guilt trip on those sitting on their wallets and reluctant to give. As Harry Shearer wrote in his epic piece “Telethon,” published in Film Comment, “It’s a Jewish-Puritan spectacle. You should enjoy; then you should feel bad; then you should give money to feel good again.”

The telethon is the one TV formula that has worked for Lewis since he and Dean divorced. In 1963, Lewis presided over a live, two-hour variety show on Saturday night that became a fabled shambles. It aspired to class, elegance, sophistication, and all that good stuff. Dick Cavett, hired as a young writer for the extravaganza, recalled that the premiere resembled a Hollywood gala from the golden age. “[Lewis] dressed himself and all the guests in tuxedos. But not only the guests. Camera operators, stage hands, ushers, off-camera crew, men invisible up in the flies wore, many for the first time, no doubt, black tie.” Unfortunately, the nation’s television critics, many of them probably sitting at home in their un-darned socks, cried phooey. “The first show got reviews comparable to the account of the attempted mooring of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst,” observed Cavett. Then President Kennedy was assassinated and the nation was in even less of a mood for an uproarious romp. Two decades later Lewis tried again on TV in a more manageable format, a syndicated talk show for Metromedia where, flanked by master of mimicry Charlie Callas (he of the iguana tongue), he invited other showbiz luminaries into his make-believe living room so that they could tell one another how great they were. In Jerry Lewis’s universe, every kindred star was not only a phenomenal talent but a great humanitarian, a humble peasant at heart, and a complete, total pussycat. My personal favorite highlight from the series’ brief run was when Lewis told singer Mel Tormé from the bottom of his gourd, “You have driven your theatrical prowess through the galaxies and back,” and the Velvet Fog didn’t even blush or act abashed, accepting such tribute as his due. If the show had been giddier in its soapy back scrubbing of ego and less of a comedy seminar, it might have achieved the groovy schmaltz of Sammy Davis Jr.’s weekly talk show, Sammy and Company, which inspired the classic SCTV send-up “The Sammy Maudlin Show,” where Joe Flaherty’s host Sammy Maudlin would slap his thigh silly from uncontrollable laughter at some lame joke. No, the SCTV sketch that Lewis inspired was the beyond twisted “Martin Scorsese’s Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs-Élysées,” where, between infantile gags and tearful outbursts, Martin Short’s Jerry would gnomically reflect, “Where are you, the public, expected to find the love and the caring and the feeling and the good and the nice? And even if you did, it wouldn’t be the good kind, because of the difference caused by the earlier thing.” At the finale, baguettes bombarded the stage as part of the audience ovation.

The acclaim of the French has become a horse collar around Lewis’s neck, a source of domestic ridicule from our own tastemakers. How many millions of times have you heard someone scoff, “What do the French know? They think Jerry Lewis is a genius.” The French know a lot (Jeanne Moreau’s smoky silences contain multitudes), and perhaps to French cinéastes Lewis’s comedy possesses an abstract, askew formalism—a klutzy Kabuki quality that to Americans is simply the candy machine of kiddie entertainment going tilt. On the sets of film comedies such as The Ladies Man, The Bellboy, and The Errand Boy, in his canvas throne as actor-screenwriter-director-producer (his guidebook for aspiring multi-talents was titled The Total Film-Maker), he presided over a giant dollhouse, his personal puppet theater—the precursor to Pee-wee’s Playhouse. In his schlemiel roles, Lewis adopts a stooped, knock-kneed posture, as if his body were collapsing inwardly, the Cubistic angles unable to bear the load of the next mishap to befall him. He’s a defective beta product aspiring to be an alpha-male Big Man on Campus. This duality was the basis for his most enduring character, the Nutty Professor, a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure who was an ineffectual, milquetoast mutterer until he swallowed the potion that transformed him into Buddy Love, the lounge-lizard lady-killer whose kiss-off arrogance literally blew cigarette smoke into the faces of squares. The perfect name, because love for Lewis is always laced with lippy demand—Come on, baby, give. (The string of stations that broadcast his fund-raising telethon are known as the Love Network, as if asking the viewers to pucker up and deliver.)

For his films’ sentimental interludes, those muffled pleas for love, Lewis would inflict Pagliacci sad-sackness on the camera, much as Jackie Gleason did as the “Poor Soul” and the mute in Gigot, or Red Skelton did putting on the clown paint and Emmett Kelly rags. In 1972, Lewis went all out, directing The Day the Clown Cried and starring as the broken-down circus clown who entertains Jewish children en route to the extermination camp, eventually joining them in the gas chamber. The feel-bad movie of the century, it was unfinished and never released, growing in rumor and legend into the most talked-about, apocrypha-shrouded film for fortune hunters everywhere, along with Orson Welles’s uncompleted The Other Side of the Wind. Harry Shearer, one of the few to have laid eyes on a rough cut of The Day the Clown Cried, compared it to flying to Tijuana and finding a painting of Auschwitz on black velvet, an act of bad taste that defies reason.

Given such follies, not to mention his Paleolithic attitude toward female comics and gross lapses into stereotypical ethnic humor, it’s easy to be derisive of Jerry Lewis, to regard him as black-velvet kitsch. I’ve always found Lewis more fascinating than ha-ha funny, and the source of his fascination is the core power he possesses, his prodigious boiler system. So many comedians seem to shrink into themselves when they’re not going for laughs, the light in their refrigerator going out once the door closes. When Jim Carrey and Robin Williams go the sincere route, they lose their elasticity as performers, become ordinary. Lewis is the opposite. When he isn’t “on,” he’s the opposite of off; his presence intensifies with an increase of dark matter, transmitting scary-dad authority even when trussed up and immobile, as he was playing the talk-show host held hostage in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983). His seething undercurrent isn’t solely a matter of temperament. For years it was also rooted in physical anguish. In 1965, Lewis took a spill on a wet spot on the set of the Andy Williams variety show that fractured his skull and knocked a chip out of his spinal column. He was tormented by misery and nausea until he was given Percodan, which lofted away the pain but also inflated his sense of well-being and eventually curtained him behind a thick haze. Performing was like flying through fog. “In fact,” Lewis says in Dean and Me, “I’m ashamed to say that there’s an entire block of MDA Telethons—some four or five years in the mid- and late-seventies—that I have no recollection of whatsoever.” Those were the telethons whose run-on monologues and flares of temper made voyeur fiends out of Harry Shearer and TV junkies. It was the punk era, and in his own way Jerry fit right in.

In past years, part of the Telethon’s lure was the opportunity to see this beautiful humanitarian turn self-pitying and nasty as the hours dragged by. You could count on a really ugly rampage if you held out till five or six in the morning. “Where are all my so-called good friends in Las Vegas?” he once demanded in the doldrums of a New York telethon. “They say, ‘Jerry, God bless you, you’re doing great things,’ but I would really like to hear where the hell these people are when I need them . . . ”

—Harry Shearer, “Telethon,” Film Comment, 1979.

There’ll be none of that this year. Jerry won’t be working a graveyard shift, there’s no one left to harangue, and the mood will be valedictory. Jerry will continue until he drops, driving his theatrical prowess through the galaxies and back, because that’s what those in his entertainment generation do, and his will be the last tuxedo standing.